The Life of Chuck
Director: Mike Flanagan
2024
28 July 2025
See
The life of Charles Kranz (Tom Hiddleston) an accountant who wanted to be a dancer, through three acts. Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a school teacher navigating what feels like the end of the world, with everyone too scared to say so. Instead at parent-teacher evenings and to neighbours they circle the drain discussing increasing natural disasters like most of California sliding into the sea, semi-permanent internet outages, and spontaneous sinkholes downtown and work absenteeism and long lost romances rekindling. So he too reaches out to his ex-wife, Felicia (Karen Gillan) , a nurse. Both notice billboards and ads saying “39 great years, thanks Chuck.” On a work trip, Chuck stops to dance before a street busker. And finally the why, with a young Chuck (played by Benjamin Pajak as a child and Jacob Tremblay as a teenager) learning to dance.
Think
The reverse three act structure is so inventive and yet deceptively simple, I’d expect nothing less from Mike Flanagan, who blew me away with his Netflix series: The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher. I haven’t yet seen his early indy films but did watch Doctor Sleep, The Shining sequel.
Like with The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, The Green Mile and now The Life of Chuck by adapting this Stephen King short story (from the collection If It Bleeds) Flanagan shows he can do more than genre just like the horror master.
Feel
Don’t go in the attic. Or the annexe. Or is it atrium? (Cupola). Whatever the top room of the old house is, (cupola) that’s what makes this a Stephen King story. Albie (Mark Hamil) a kindly grandfather, forbids Chuck to try and see what’s behind the the locked door, and yet makes it tantalising by drinking too much one night and talking about it cryptically. There are moments when Flanagan shows show suspense can be as scary as horror, like when Marty is talking to a little girl on the street and the lights go out. Then with Felicia as the stars start to pop.
It was pointed out to me that the aesthetic and production design are off, a bit too bright and twee as if to try and counterbalance a dark and heavy story, which made it feel fake. But I’ll forgive it because I fell into the story. I love the familiar faces of recurring cast throughout Flanagan’s films and series; Rahul Kohli, Annalise Basso, Samantha Sloyan, and wife in real life Kate Siegel, who plays Miss Richards, an overwhelmed school teacher who helps Chuck understand the meaning of “I contain multitudes,” from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself. But it’s the exposition that gets me, as well as the transitions that King and Flanagan do so well. The two finger rhythm of Hiddleston starting to dance before the drummer, and the flashback of his grandma doing the same in the kitchen where he first started to dance.
